Using non-destructive test to validate and calibrate smart sensors for urban pavement monitoring

Abstract

In the context of smart cities, infrastructures play a strategic role to guarantee sustainability, efficiency, safety, and resiliency. Several solutions can be adopted, but the key factor for the success of the solution selected is its ability of improving the maintenance management process. Specifically, in order to timely identify pavement needs, early, effective and continuous monitoring is needed to reduce total costs and to extend service life. Over the years several efforts have been made to implement more advanced and effective monitoring systems at ever more contained costs, going from impractical manual and destructive methods through automated in vehicle equipment to the most recent Smart Sensor Network (SSN) embedded into/positioned on the pavement. While traditional systems (GPR and FWD) are currently used in road pavement maintenance where they have shown their reliability and effectiveness, instead smart sensors in pavement maintenance are promising but in the early stage of investigation. The objective of the presented study is to test a solution that can be used to make smarter the road pavement monitoring. Specifically, this paper details an urban site investigation comprising Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) and vibro-acoustic sensors. GPR and FWD are used for providing reference data of pavement bearing capacity. In the paper, tests and results in selected trial sites are used to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT analysis) of the application of smart vibro-acoustic sensors for the assessment of pavement residual life. Results show that the method is able to evaluate pavement deterioration (above all in terms of presence and entity of cracks) by means of meaningful features extracted from the vibro-acoustic signatures (acoustic signals) of the road pavement loaded by urban traffic, with the aim of using these data to build innovative performance curves able to improve an urban pavement management system.